Allergies? Here’s what happens inside your system – and what to do about it!

Are you dreading the spring pollenpocalypse that triggers your allergies? You’re not alone!

One in two people in the UK now suffer with allergies, with hayfever being the most common complaint, new research suggests. 51% of women have at least one allergy compared with 37% of men.

Allergies appear to be on the rise across the UK. An estimated 21 million adults in the UK suffer from at least one allergy, with 10 million suffering from more than one.

To cope with your allergies, here’s a quick ‘n’ easy guide to understand how they work: first, a harmless foreign substance called an antigen (like pollen, for example) enters your system.

Your immune system freaks out, and releases an antibody called IgE, which is bound to some mast cells. These thug types go clunking over to the innocent antigen, and try to bind to it, in order to get rid of it.

In the struggle, the mast cells are stimulated to release what they contain – histamines. Loads of them.

Histamines are the good-guys-turned-bad-guys. Their function is really to protect you, by making your system react in such a way that it will flood or explode the antigen out of there. Runny nose, watery eyes, constriction of bronchi, tissue swelling – these are all things your body does to try to expel the stuff it thinks is trying to harm you.

Unfortunately, in this scenario, all this trouble is for nothing. The poor pollen cells really weren’t a threat to your system to begin with, and it’s the overreaction of your immune system with IgE that has made everything go horribly wrong.

So what we really need to do here, is to sort out your immune system, so that it’s still protecting you from the bad stuff, but not overreacting to innocent antigens.

How do you do this? The best, safest and most natural way to do this is to drink kefir. Kefir is called “immunomodulatory,” which means that it actually alters the working of your immune system. Kefir has been shown by scientists to have two separate functions that work powerfully together to lower allergic response:

Kefir lowers the amount of IgE in your system, so that your system doesn’t overreact to antigens in the first place.